And there are the more inward and spiritual duties of religion, as the exercise of faith, fear, love, hope, joy, patience, contentation, humble submission, and choosing of God, and cleaving to God, and delighting in God, and admiring of God, and exalting of God, and following hard after God, and holy meditation, and self-examination, &c. Now all these lie in the very spirit of the command. Now in the exercise of these more spiritual duties our fellowship and communion with God mainly lies. In the more general duties of religion, an hypocrite may manifest the excellency of his gifts; but in the more spiritual duties of religion, a sincere Christian doth manifest both the excellency and efficacy of grace. Mark, an unsound heart looks no further than to the bare letter of the command, to bare hearing, and bare praying, and bare preaching, and bare fasting, and bare giving, and bare receiving, and bare suffering; he looks no further than to that part of the command which only binds the flesh, or outward man; and if he does but observe that in the gross, he thinks he hath done marvellous well; like a melancholy man, that matters not what melody and harmony he makes, so he does but touch the strings of the instrument. But now, a sound, a sincere Christian, he looks to the spirit of the command; and if he does not come up to that in sincere desires, in gracious purposes, in fixed resolutions, and in cordial endeavours, he can have no peace, no rest, no quiet, no comfort. O sirs! as ever you would see God, and enjoy God another day, you must labour, not only to obey the letter of the command, but also to bring your hearts to the sincere obedience of the spirit of the command. This is a very close, piercing, distinguishing, and discovering sign.

Oh let me beseech you, for the Lord’s sake, for your soul’s sake, to value the gospel. Alas! What are we without it, but condemned malefactors, every moment liable to called forth and hung up, as monuments of God’s fury, in hell! If ever poor creature, in fear every moment of being fetched out of the prison and carried to the gallows, did esteem a pardon, sure I am ye have cause to prize the gospel. O sirs, how had all of us at this day been shut up under the law’s curse, in the dungeon of endless wrath and misery, had not the gospel opened the prison doors, knocked off our shackles and set our souls at liberty!

So the apostle says here, “Therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly, that God hath made that same Jesus, whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ” (v. 36). It is a solemn thought that we are face to face with God. You may say, “I’m all right. I’m happy. I have all I want. It’s a wonderful life.” Yes, but how do you explain these facts concerning Jesus of Nazareth? Why did it happen? Why did it have to happen? Why did God send Him? Why was this God’s plan? You are a living soul, and this has happened in your world, and it has happened with respect to you, just as it has with respect to everybody else, because in spite of our differences, in one respect we are all the same: We are all sinners in the sight of God. “There is none righteous, no, not one” (Rom. 3:10).

The issue cannot be evaded by talking about psychology and temperament and by quoting experiences. Every one of us is confronted by the fact of this Jesus of Nazareth…

So the question confronting you is not what you need, but who this person is. Why did the prophets write about Him, and, especially, why did God ever send Him to die? Has this got anything to do with me? That is your question. That is the way to face history. That is the way to face the history even of a great man. You do not just say, “How wonderful he was!” You say, “What has all this got to do with me?” You relate yourself to history, and that is right and good; we should all be trying to do that. But here is the supreme fact of history: Why Jesus Christ? Why Bethlehem? Why Golgotha? Why the tomb? Why the Resurrection? Why the descent of the Holy Spirit? Why the church? Why all these things?

Why am I, or why is anyone else, a preacher of the Gospel? There is only one answer to that question. I am a preacher because I believe I have been called; because in my little way God has given me a burden; because I know by personal experience, by the experience of others, and by experience garnered from the reading of history that there is nothing under heaven that can enable men and women to conquer and to master life and to have a hope that cannot be dimmed except this Gospel. Therefore, the most urgent task in the world today is to make the Gospel known to men and women. And this is the function of the Christian church.

He [Christ], in His human as well as His Divine nature, has been, is now, and will ever be, the centre not only of the natural but of the redeemed creation….Our Lord, in short, was exalted, not to be separated forever from a world which crucified Him, from a world with the weakness and sorrow and sins of which He was once in contact, but that He may apply to it His ample and free forgiveness, together with the inexhaustible resources of His power.

The mark of a true Christian is not a sheep who has gone looking for the Good Shepherd and found a man who seems to fit the bill, but someone who has been been looked for and found by God. ….Saul [St. Paul] had not found God; God had found him. Ananias did not persuade Saul to believe, nor did he argue about whether God exists. What he did was to claifyr for Saul something that he already new to be true form his experience but was unable to articulate. … The man who had told his disciples, “I am the truth and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me,” had met Saul on the road to Damascus, because he loved him. Jesus had given himself up to death so that Saul could live a new life in union with him. ….